KOKOMO – Here’s what you miss when you watch the Chicago Cubs play the St. Louis Cardinals, watching it on TV in a living room in Kokomo with a World War II navy fighter pilot in a blue Cubs shirt on your left and a retired U.S. Army gunnery sergeant in Cardinals red on your right:

You miss everything.

You miss it when Cardinals third baseman Matt Carpenter, who has homered in his last six games, bunts for a single against Joe Maddon’s defensive shift. You miss it when a first-base coach tosses a baseball to a kid in the crowd, but the ball bounces away and an adult grabs it and everyone watching on TV has a meltdown. Everyone but us. Because we missed it. Wasn’t until I got home later Sunday night that I learned those things had happened in Chicago. Because in Kokomo, none of us knew.

What were we doing? Well, we were watching the game, or trying, but retired Navy fighter pilot Gene Sweeney is teasing the Army gunner, Bud Everhart, about “the old rattletraps they used to fly in the Army,” and Everhart is firing back that he could have joined the Navy in 1944 but had the good sense to enlist in the Army instead. We’re reliving the single worst trade in Major League Baseball, when Bud’s Cardinals stole Lou Brock from Gene’s Cubs in 1964, and comparing notes on flagpoles: Both have an American flag outside their home, but a few miles away Bud is flying a Cardinals flag, too.

They’re talking about the Great Depression and how the bank took one of their farms in 1938. They’re taking me back to Wrigley Field in 1928 and old Sportsman’s Park in 1940s St. Louis. They’re remembering the effort it required, in those days, to get a game on TV or radio. They’re talking about Red Schoendienst and Kiki Cuyler and Hack Wilson, names baseball fans know but players we didn’t see; Gene and Bud saw them.

They’re talking about marriage, how Gene married his high school sweetheart and Bud married just a little later than that, and how it was true: ‘Til death do us part. Gene and Bud still wear their wedding rings.

“You’re up one,” is how it begins, Gene Sweeney greeting Bud Everhart at the door with the barest of scoring updates, an update Bud needs because it’s the bottom of the first, and the Cardinals had scored in the top half of the inning on Paul DeJong’s sacrifice fly.

“Oh yeah?” Bud says, and we’re off.

The game picks up steam in the fourth inning – the Cubs score twice to make it 2-2 – but starts to fizzle as the Cubs score in the sixth and keep on scoring. Bud is sitting on my right, not saying much as another game gets away from his Cardinals, a sigh here or a frustrated exhale there, and Gene is doing his best to be the gracious winner and polite host as Kyle Schwarber goes deep and Kris Bryant singles in a run and Cardinals reliever Brett Cecil comes in and makes things worse.

“I’m just grinning,” Gene says. “I don’t want to get a riot started.”

Gene is 94 and Bud’s 92, but they’re still long and lean and looking like they could bust out 20 push-ups and then take me, the civilian sitting between them, if it comes to that. Which it won’t. They’ve been around too long and seen too much to get worked up over a baseball game.

Gene figures it was 1928 – and after four hours in the man’s living room, I’m telling you, he hasn’t forgotten a thing – when he saw his first game at Wrigley. He was 5, and his dad worked for Carnegie Steel on the south side of Chicago. Gene remembers Gabby Hartnett behind the plate and Kiki Cuyler in right field, only he’s saying the name weird, saying Kiki like it rhymes with “tie-dye”, when I’ve always believed it rhymed with “geeky.”

“Are you sure about …” and then I stop. What am I saying? I’ve only read about Kiki Cuyler. Gene Sweeney was in the bleachers at Wrigley in 1928, watching Cuyler play. He’s smiling at me.

“I had a Kiki Cuyler glove,” he says.

Bud Everhart’s allegiance to the Cardinals burns as passionately as Gene’s to the Cubs – outside Busch Stadium is a Stan Musial statue; under that statue is a $350 sponsorship brick bearing the name of Bud and his daughter, Kristy – though not for as long. As a boy in Greene County, Bud wasn’t much of a baseball fan. No time for that. His parents had a farm near Jasonville, and Bud was 3 when the Great Depression hit. Neighbors were losing their farms and Bud was working the land and tending to the horses and not having any idea that his parents couldn’t pay the principal on their mortgage, then couldn’t pay the interest, then …

“We got a letter in the mail,” Bud says, and that’s about all he’ll say about the day his parents learned the bank was taking their farm. “It was a pretty emotional time.”

They moved to Gilmour, a town so small the U.S. Census didn’t bother with it. (Local kids went to Union High in Dugger, and Bud graduated in 1944.) It was in Gilmour where Bud Everhart became a Cardinals fan.

“I made friends with five boys,” he says, “all Cardinals fans. They informed me I’d be a Cardinals fan. Too many to fight, so …”

Bud does that sometimes. He trails off, not because he forgets what he's saying, but because he’s said enough. For example: During the game we’re watching – remember? – Brett Cecil is getting lit up and Bud is grumbling that the Cardinals “had to get Cecil from somewhere in the American League, and I don’t know why. You see how he’s pitching? That’s how he’s been pitching since he got here. He might have pitched well in the American League, but …”

* * *

Gene Sweeney is talking about the maneuvers he and his Navy buddies made in those old N2S Stearman biplanes in Oklahoma, flying figure-8’s around the oil derricks or skimming the surface of the Cimarron River, which had gone dry in spots so Gene and his pals would fly under the pipes spanning one side of the Cimarron to the other. His daughter Elizabeth is listening in a nearby chair and saying, “It’s a wonder I was even born.”

Gene’s saying that he was sworn into the U.S. Navy in 1943, “and do you know who swore me in? Jay Berwanger!”

When Berwanger won the Heisman Trophy in 1935 it was called the Downtown Athletic Club Trophy. He was a halfback for the University of Chicago when he won that inaugural trophy, then turned down the hometown Chicago Bears because he wanted to be a pilot in the navy.

Times were different back then. Before Gene Sweeney worked as a mechanical engineer for Kingston Products on North Webster Street, before Bud Everhart worked for the Chrysler Plant on South Reed Road, they enlisted. Gene was a dive bomber and later a flight instructor, same as Jay Berwanger. Bud was a gunner on the 50-caliber machine gun. Somehow, both ended up in planes. Gene always wanted to fly; Bud just remembers standing in line for basic training at Sheppard Field near Wichita Falls, Texas.

“They asked the guy ahead of me: ‘Will you go on planes?’ He said no, so they stamped ‘infantry’ on his paper,” Bud says. “I was next. Guess what? I said I wanted to fly, because …”

Now Bud’s remembering an October night at Sheppard Field, how he and his buddies gathered around an old transistor radio and listened to the Cubs and Detroit Tigers in the 1945 World Series.

“The plastic on the outside was busted off, but it still worked,” he says of the radio, which has him remembering how he used to listen to the Cardinals on KMOX, whose signal from St. Louis just barely reached his car in Kokomo, and in Bud’s case only in the front yard. Not in the driveway – the front yard. He’d roll the car across the grass, a few feet at a time, until the signal came in.

Well, that has Gene remembering when his family got its first television set and Gene climbed onto the roof and fiddled with the antenna so he could watch his Cubbies. He recites the infield from 80 years ago – “Charlie Grimm at first, Billy Herman at second, Billy Jurges at short, Stan Hack at third” – and I tell him about growing up with the Cubs on WGN, and the time I spotted former Cubs first baseman Leon “Bull” Durham at my gym in Fairfield, Ohio, and recited for Bull the Cubs’ batting order from 1984.

Gene and Bud are nodding. They understand. Bud talks about that day in April 1982 when he was driving to Terre Haute to see his sister, and he was listening as KMOX talked about the Cardinals’ new shortstop, Ozzie Smith.

“I get to (Highway) 59, and Terre Haute is 25 minutes south, but they were talking about Ozzie playing his first home game that night and I just kept going west,” he says. “When I got to the ballpark they were playing the Star-Spangled Banner. I don’t know what prompted me, but …”

No need to finish that sentence. He doesn’t know what prompted him to drive six hours to St. Louis, but …

Baseball.

Which reminds me: The game! Who’s winning now? Ah, looks like the Cubs won 7-2. After a few minutes Gene Sweeney sees me to the door with a smile on his face. Bud’s smiling, too – only a game, you know? – but it looks like he isn’t leaving just yet. The door closes behind me as a couple of baseball fans, charter members of our greatest generation, get comfortable. Outside the wind picks up, and Old Glory stands at attention.

Where's Gregg?

Sports columnist Gregg Doyel is driving around Indiana this summer in search of great stories, from Terre Haute to Nyesville to today's living room in Kokomo.